William Gibson

Some of my earliest memories are of science fiction. Not of prose fiction, or of film, but of the cultural and industrial semiotics of the American nineteen-fifties: the interplanetarily themed chrome trim on my father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88; the sturdy injection-molded styrene spacemen on the counter at Woolworth’s (their mode of manufacture more predictive than their subject, as it turned out); the gloriously baroque Atomic Disintegrator cap pistol (Etsy currently has one on offer, in “decent vintage” condition, for two hundred and fifty dollars); Chesley Bonestell’s moodily thrilling illustrations for Willy Ley’s book “The Conquest of Space.” They were all special to me, these things, and I remember my mother remarking on this to her friends. Not that I was very unusual in my obsession. The zeitgeist was chewy with space-flavored nuggets, morsels of futuristic design, precursors of a Tomorrow whose confident glow was visible beyond the horizon of all that was less wonderful, provided one had eyes to see it.

ABSTRACT: DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION re St. Clair McKelway's article on inter-service rivalry during the war (THAT WAS A REPORTER AT WIT'S END. June 14, 1958). This writer would like to vouch for the truth of what Mr. McKelway says. The writer was with the Twentieth Fighter Command, and when they were assigned to Admiral Nimitz & the Navy, the people of the Command, from Brig. Gen. Ernest Moore on down, began to burn just as Mr. McKelway did. General Moore had to take orders not only from Admiral Nimitz & Gen. LeMay but also from the U.S. Army Forces, Central Pacific Area, in Hawaii, and from the Army Air Forces, Pacific Ocean Areas. The writer doubts whether there was another Air Forces general who occupied a more confusing command position in the war.

ABSTRACT: The writer recalls an incident from his childhood in a Brooklyn tenement. He and another boy, Alfred Glezen, picked up some small garden snakes from the ground at the back of the house and tried to train them to lie down in his sister's doll house. They were interrupted and the snakes crawled away. Then the writer decided they should go out and catch a mole.